


Study Partners

by Colubrina



Series: Dramione One Shots [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, F/M, Post-War, eighth year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 02:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20368978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colubrina/pseuds/Colubrina
Summary: Hermione Granger offers to help Draco Malfoy study for a mandatory 8th Year class on Muggle Studies.  He is not opposed to the idea.





	Study Partners

The problem with Granger was she didn’t know as much as she thought she did. And she desperately wanted to show off what she did know. It was a bit pathetic, really. Draco Malfoy leaned back in his seat and produced his best smirk. 

“If you keep staring at her like that, she’ll turn around and notice,” Blaise said with far too much amusement.

Draco flipped him a two-fingered salute, which got him a laugh, which got him Slughorn’s attention. “Do you gentlemen have any questions?” he asked. The tone was about as chipper as a man more dedicated to good food than teaching could manage this early in the morning. “It’s good to ask when you don’t know things,” he added when neither Draco nor Blaise offered up a question, and that got Hermione Granger to turn around, along with half the N.E.W.T. class.

War had changed her. Well, it had changed all of them. It had turned her from marginally suspect outsider to heroine and turned him from gifted son of a pureblood family to an embarrassment most people managed not to see. Draco could watch it happen in the eyes of his classmates. They registered Blaise – rich arsehole – and then shifted the focus of their vision so he simply wasn’t there. It wasn’t Blaise and Draco. It was Blaise and I-don’t-know-some-bloke-I-guess.

Granger didn’t do that. She fixed her eyes on him, wrinkled her nose, and scowled, but she _saw_ him. She didn’t pretend he wasn’t there.

“Well,” Slughorn said awkwardly when neither he nor Blaise spoke, “if there are no questions, we can move on to brewing. Remember, this is a tricky potion, but it’s on the practical part of the N.E.W.T. exam one year out of three, so it’s worth your time to get it right.”

Draco got it right. He always got the unimportant things right. Want a potion brewed perfectly to exact specifications? He was your guy. Pick the right side in a war? Hah. He was far less talented there. He turned in the vials to Slughorn’s bland smile, cleaned up his workspace, and hitched his bag over his shoulder. One class down. Next was lunch, which he’d skip because he didn’t care to sit in a room filled with people who treated him like a problem it was probably best to ignore. He’d cadged a couple spare apples from the breakfast table, and they and the lake would do.

He scanned the room before he left. No bushy head. Granger had somehow finished before him. “You’re cute when you’re lovelorn,” Blaise said.

“Bugger off,” was Draco’s suggestion to that, and then it was down to the lake on his own. The fall was still early enough the air was crisp rather than cold, but the ground had an ice to it that seeped up into his trousers and skin. He pulled out the Muggle Studies book – required remediation for anyone like him – and sat on it. It helped a little.

“You’re going to ruin that book.” The voice was busy and scolding and made him dig his fingers into the skin of his apple. Granger.

“What are you doing here?”

She pulled a small wool blanket out of her incredibly ugly beaded bag, folded it several times, and sat down on it all too primly. Trust Granger to come prepared, though why the hell _she_ wanted to avoid the lunch crowd Draco didn’t know. She was one of the shining stars of this new world. She hadn’t even taken her N.E.W.T.s yet, and people were already talking about how she’d have a career that went right to the top, how she’d be a Ministry star. “I’m eating,” she said. A small sandwich wrapped in paper followed the blanket and a bottle of butterbeer after that. “And you really shouldn’t sit on that book.”

Draco just stared at her.

She leaned over, her face getting far too close to his leg, her bushy head at an angle that made blood rush places as he considered this was awfully close to what it’d look like if she were blowing him, and then she said, “Oh, that book,” in a tone of utter condemnation and – thank god – his fledgling erection withered and died.

“I’d think you’d like this one,” he said as nastily as he could manage while shifting his leg to make sure no tented trousers caught her eye. “It’s about you, isn’t it?”

She took a bite of her sandwich and snorted. “It’s wrong,” she said. “The information is so far from how Muggle’s live it might as well be a fantasy. Or a historical.”

“A historical?”

“No one’s used farthings for… well… since before I was born, anyway.” She took another bite and regarded the book with the look she used to reserve for him: a little disgusted, a little pitying. “But, still, it’ll get ruined if you sit on it. Here.” She half stood up, spread her blanket out a bit, and sat back down. Utterly bemused, Draco moved to sit next to her, careful to stay right at the edge of the wool.

“_Accio_ book,” she said and began flipping through the pages. She pointed to a picture of a what was labeled ‘telephone’ and said, “That’s something my grandmother would have had, and that,” her finger went to a stylized duck, “is a bath toy, not a religious object.”

Draco read the caption. _Rubber duck. Given to children as part of a superstitious cleaning ritual. Because ducks live in water, Muggles use this object to attempt to harness what we would call _sympathetic magic_ to make themselves as clean as the duck. Scholars postulate this fruitless attempt at a simple spell is a cultural memory from before the Statute of Secrecy._

He snickered. Trust the Ministry to produce an absolutely wrong textbook. When he glanced up at her face, she was smiling a bit uncertainly. “I could teach you, you know,” she said.

“Teach me what?” 

She shrugged. “The Muggle world. How the money works. How to order in a shop. Things like that.”

“What a rubber duck is?” Draco said a bit tentatively. This was new territory, and he wasn’t sure how to navigate it. Three years ago, classmates would have fought for the chance to be his study partner. Smart. Rich. Powerful family. Now, he was persona-non-grata, and couldn’t quite believe she meant it. 

She smiled again, and it made the freckles on her cheeks rise like the sun. “Not the most important thing, but sure.”

“I… I’d like that,” he said. This was crossing some kind of barrier, and there should be a rush of wind, or a hawk swooping by, or something to show this was a portent. Instead, nothing at all happened except she nodded and took another bite of her sandwich. “Why are you down here, anyway?” he asked.

“I hate everyone,” she said around her food. “I can’t stand them all staring at me all the time.”

“Me too,” he said, then in a rush, “Not the staring.” No one stared at him anymore. The opposite, really, but none of them knew what it had been like. Not really. They’d been on the edges of hell and thought that meant they knew what demons were. They didn’t. He resented them for that, resented them and hated them for judging what he’d done to survive.

“No one gets it,” she said. “At least you don’t think I’m some kind of perfect freak.”

“Oh, you’re a freak all right,” he said, then felt a rush of fear that was the wrong thing, she’d pick up and go, she’d –

“Fuck off,” she said complacently, followed by, “Do you have another apple? I’ll trade for a butterbeer.”

He did, and she did.


End file.
